No, the purpose of sprint planning is to specify (more ot less) exactly what you plan to do this sprint. Usually the best case scenario. You make your best effort to finish the things you outlined, sometimes you manage to do it, sometimes you don’t, but why would you ever try to do more than you planned to do? If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint. You’ve literally done your job. Why in the world would you want to “pull more stuff in”?
That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.
Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.
> If you’ve done the tasks, you’re done, period, go relax, grab a beer, wait till the next sprint.
Well, to each their own, but that has never been the case in any of the companies I've worked at. In fairness, over the fast 5 years or so more and more the companies I've worked at have used Kanban over sprint planning, because usually the "estimation" part of agile (i.e. the cards, the voting) has proven to be the most useless piece of agile.
Regardless of what you use, you should have a clear idea of what you plan to accomplish in the next n days. And you need to communicate this information to your manager. If you have done that, and the manager agrees it’s a reasonable objective then I don’t see how what you describe can ever happen. If an unplanned task comes up with a high priority then you simply tell your manager: “OK, sure, which of the planned tasks do you want to delay?”
It doesn’t matter what you use for planning, you agree to do something in advance, and you provide a reasonable estimate of how long it will take. Your manager should trust your estimates, even if they are sometimes wrong.
I’ve worked at both types of places. The main difference was if one was a contractor or on salary.
I also believe everyone needs a mental break at the end of an accomplished iteration. The satisfaction of feeling done. You might only answer email or edit docs on that day but that’s definitely worthwhile.
Not to mention, when you have a family, weekends aren’t especially relaxing, so if you “sprint” every week for years, it leads to almost certain burnout.
In other words, we don’t run marathons at full speed for a reason.
Oh and by the way, even at the contracting place where we were given fresh tickets when done early, no one ever expected them done immediately. So in effect we’d sit on them, take a mental break, and everyone was happy with appearances—the theater of work.
That’s how I’ve done it, and have seen it done in the last 7 companies I worked at.
Your reasoning is so foreign to me. The only way it makes sense if you are speaking as a manager.